The Art of Presence:

Abstract

The unique multimedia experience offered by motion pictures has the particular ability to create “real time” experience, or the sense of “being there” in the world conjured. Because film appears to be immediate in its visual, aural, and narrative representations, its illusion of “reality” is extremely powerful. For this reason, the arenas of film and cultural studies have been attentive to the ideological capacity of this medium, particularly to its ability to make normative the structures of power that organize society along divisions of gender, race, and class. Crucial to this agenda is the affirmation that human representations always present a point of view that is distinct from some conceit of “the way things are,” or perhaps even from the way things ought to be. Hence representations, particularly the most potent ones, are in need of critique.

David James, “Im Kwon-Taek: Korean National Cinema and Buddhism,” in Im Kwon-Taek: The Making of a Korean National Cinema David E. James and Kyung Hyun Kim, eds. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002).Google Scholar